Living in the "Presint"

Today was one of those days where I simply fell out of sync with the rest of the universe. Robb was gone and the kids and I got back from California late last night. We were up early because I was scheduled to work at the hospital and I needed to get both of the kids to their respective places with their respective stuff. The morning included rushing, more rushing, and probably more hollering than was required. And then I lost my keys at the grocery store buying Nora diapers, and then a myriad of other little things happened that just built upon each other to make it all seem much harder than it needed to be.

I got off of work early. I decided to see if I could catch the little parade on Pearl Street that Gray was going to be in for Earth Day. It was sunny, and things were definitely looking up. I went to the Boulder Bookstore, bought a couple of books and went to sit on a bench outside to wait. Ten minutes later, I stood up and noticed that my purse was gone. Totally gone. Gone and not anywhere in the 20 feet between where I was sitting and the bookstore where I had left with my purse intact. Of course, I panicked and searched and asked and pleaded with strangers and did everything, and then after it was clear that the purse was truly gone, I rushed down to my bank and promptly burst into tears at the first person that talked to me. You know how when everything is going wrong but you are kind of holding it together until someone is nice to you or asks how you are and then you freak them out with the force of your emotion? Well, that was me and the poor twenty-something-year-old male bank teller today.

And in the end, it ends up being mostly a hassle. Whoever took the purse really got about 8 dollars in cash. So booyah to that, purse thieves! Go buy yourselves an espresso on me.

I put my babies to bed tonight and I sat on the couch and I realized as I started to read the news that with everything else that is happening in the world, my bad day is pretty self-absorbed and trivial. And I opened what Gray had been working on for me and it said this:

Love The Presint

• I Love You*

And I think… Whoa. Sometimes it takes a six-year-old kid to tell you where it’s at. And I don’t think he actually meant, like, Eckhart Tolle’s “present,” but it seemed pretty profound anyway and I think that I just might shellac this one.

I settled in and Robb called because he is getting on the airplane to come home. I know that he is getting a ride home from the airport with a friend.
He says, “So you’re headed to the airport to pick me up, right?”

Shit.

Joelle is a writer, a mom, and an occasional physical therapist. Her blog is more free-range and less helicopter, more organic than processed, more mountains than city, and more hippy than hipster – Joelle Wiser.